Historical Research, The Pathfinder, and Celtic Britain

The notion of ‘The Historical Novel’ encompasses a very broad field, from the lightest historical romance, through weapon-laden, bloke-ish historical battle-fests, through stately home flowery historical flourishes, through be-whiskered historical detective crime, through clunking, information-heavy didactic dissertations on some historical period thinly veiled in story.

And now and then there will be a psychological literary time-set masterpiece which is all novel, with history printed naturally through it with Blackpool through rock. (See Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel)

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Researching and writing historical novels induces the recognition in the mind of the writer and the reader of universal issues that relate to any and every age: love, hate, revenge, war, ambition, dominance and submission at the personal and the political level, in addition to the socio-pathic moral certainty of those who think they know best for those around them and the world.

The universality of these themes means that we, in our modern world, can enjoy a good novel with great characters set in any other time than their own.

Occasionally I wonder about the nature of my own storytelling in this mixed bag. Many of my novels, labelled ‘historical’, are set across the period from the late 19th Century to the 1960s and 1970s. Some even creep into the 1990s to a period which now seems very historical – of the past.

Now I have moved further back in history. In researching and writing my latest novel The Pathfinder – which is based in and around the crumbling of the Roman Empire in Britain and Europe – I kept thinking how similar were the attitudes and understandings of the occupiers (scions of the Roman Empire) to the Germans in WW2 in their occupation of Europe, with their aim of the Thousand-Year Reich, modelled on the Roman Empire. The German ambition came to an end very soon. But it was similar to the Romans with its principles of control, exploitation, domination and imposition of German values on what they saw as inferior peoples.

The Roman occupation of Britain pre-echoed these principles. The Roman writer Tacitus wrote. "On the beach stood the adverse array, a serried mass of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement. Then, reassured by their general, and inciting each other never to flinch before a band of females and fanatics, they charged behind the standards, cut down all who met them, and enveloped the enemy in his own flames.’

This account is echoed in Celtic myth in stories of the destruction of thousands of the priestly caste now called the Druids, driving them into the sea at Anglesey in their thousands. Tacitus’s account documents the superstitious fear the Romans had of the indigenous British with their strong organic religious identity led by religious elite with deep historical and natural scientific acumen which informed all aspects of life in Britain.

 This elite sect had sustained its power through generations with an education system for it gifted young men and woman that ensured that its values and attitudes survived through time. In this way boys and girls were bred and educated for leadership. So the occupiers’ decision to destroy this leading population had its own logic.

I was reminded again of researching my novel Long Journey Home where I found accounts of the occupying Japanese drove thousands of Chinese (the clever leading elite of Singapore) off Changi beach.

In The Pathfinder I have avoided referring to the priestly Brirish caste as Druids. For me this term has too many associations with the 19th century romanticisation of all things Celtic. A worryingly artificial construct.

In my novel I refer to my heroine Elen, her song-smith brother Lleu and their father Eddu as Seers. Similarly, as Elen like her father is an hereditary pathfinder in the ancient British trading tradition, I researched the long straight paths of pre-Roman Britain. In doing so I came across the extensive literature about Ley Lines. Again, sticking to my intention to stay within the 384 AD mindset, I have avoided using this term.

Writers of the best historical novels use historical research to feel their way into what it truly was to live in a particular time in a particular place. What emerges from their storytelling is first, that readers may enjoy and relish a well-told, sometimes quite complex, story; second, that the readers may access universal truths that hold true in any time zone and might apply to their own lives.

I hope, in my own modest way that I am one of these. 

Ideas and Creative Research: A Novelist's View

Last Thursday night one of the readers in a crowded library workshop asked a familiar question,. Where do you get you

LEAPING INTO FICTION

r ideas? Do you ever run out of ideas?

My ideas come from everywhere I go, everyone I see, every  thing I see. Twentieth century history is often involved.  Ideas will settle into a special pocket in my mind and stay almost unnoticed, lying there like pieces of coral slowly accreting further ideas and other images and becoming things of innate power and intricate potential. These images and ideas might come from books I read, films I see, newspaper accounts, letters, objects I notice at an auction or a car-boot sale.

Then later – sometimes years later –one of these ideas will swim to the surface of my mind etched all over with an urgent request that now is the time to write. Now is the time to plunge into the idea with instinctive writing and proceed to find a place for the story  and to enhance and inhabit the story with characters. Now is the time for purposeful creative research to fix a time and a psychological frame for the story.

This simultaneous creative search will involve histories, timelines, biographies, first person accounts, library, museum and art gallery visits as well as location visits with drawing book or camera in hand. All this allows me to see the world through the eyes of my characters in their time and place and permits the story to develop its own authentic reality.

Once all this is bedded down in my conscious and subconscious mind, then I can go forward and write and write so that the novel can blossom into a whole thing, ready for the more normal proofing and editing process.

By now, having taken that leap into fiction, the original idea has evolved into and entirely different thing, unique in itself. In the meantime another idea is down there in the brain pocket accreting its own associated ideas and images…

A few years ago, as a Christmas present, my daughter gave me two paintings that she;d picked up at a London auction. They are pale, understated water colours: one is of a beach with gypsy family on holiday with a book about Van Gogh sitting on what looks like a painter’s stool; the other is  a hut filled with bunks and draped with washing, occupied by pale men. The date is` 1955. The artist is named. By New Years Day a strong  idea about these paintings and this painter clearly settled down into my brain pocket.

Years later this idea has bobbed up with all sorts of new ideas stuck to it; it is already inhabited by two characters. I have now almost completed  the creative research and begun writing what I think will be a short novel involving this idea.

Here we go again. It’s not just the ideas. It’s what you do with them.

Extract:'...Now the three older Romany boys had abandoned their ballgame and begun to turn hands-free somersaults on the sand. One boy managed to do four somersaults ins succession and Maggie couldn’t resist clapping. The men stopped playing cards and looked across at her, unsmiling. The somersaulting stopped. The smallest of the boys ran to stand beside his mother who was sitting under her own canopy, embroidering something wrapped in a white cloth...' 

Dark Light Shining Olympic Novel Marathon 4 Research as the springboard for fiction.

Research as the springboard for fiction.

With my background in history and sociology I have  researched material, people and places which have in the first place been nothing to do with my fiction. Some of this was for academic essays, reports and journalism. But alongside this is fiction. One example of this is Paulie’s Web (see sidebar) which emerged from work and enquiry in a women’s prison.

Twins appear in more than one novel
lNB Another great Len Thurston cover.
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A Dark Light Shining came from quite another place.

One day the vicar of what had been Witton Park  - which had been a cruelly poor village in the 1930 - asked if I would record interviews with old people there – one was a hundred years old – who had experienced that village throughout the twentieth century. I interviewed a number of these very interesting people and duly created a transcribed archive.

One of the youngest of these people – a lovely lady in her mid seventies - had been the daughter of a shopkeeper – marginally less poor than her neighbours.

 I asked her about holidays.  

‘Oh!’ she said ‘I never had a holiday until I was forty.’ She paused. ‘Except for when I was twenty one, when I went to Nice in the South of France. Thomas Cook. Twenty six pounds seventeen and six. I went by train. On my own.  Two women joined me on the train. One got on near Birmingham. She was a bookmaker’s wife. The other got on the train in London. She was very beautiful,  what they called a model and was going to meet her man friend down there. We stayed in different kinds of hotel but we met every morning to swim and drink hot chocolate. I stayed in an auberge and the waiter introduced me to Sauternes. I have drunk that ever since.  Right up till now.’

‘Why France?’ I asked.

‘There was this woman who came to live in the village. She was different, She even wore trousers. She was married to a man who had been injured in the great war. Shell shock, you know! Anyway in the Great War she’d gone to France, rented a house behind the lines so she could be near him. She loved France. Told me all about it. She had maps. So when my father drew an insurance when I was twenty one and asked me where I wanted to go, I said France.’  She showed me a treasured pale green fabric belt that she had worn on that holiday. 

(NB in the novel this woman is transformed into Jenefer Loumis. And the young girl traveller becomes Finnuola – called Finn.  See below.)

It seemed incredible: a naïve  young village girl aged 21-going-on-12 making that journey one her own around 1933. I checked the Thomas Cook archive in London and found she was not alone in travelling alone in Europe in the 1930s. Then, researching the historical background, I became interested in the fact that her unique personal adventure took place in the year that Hitler came to power in Germany.

Fiction emerging from Fact:

After a year or so all these fragments came together like iron filings under a magnet and this novel – this fiction – came to life as A Dark Light Shining. By this time the character Finnuola is her own self, not the lady from the shop. And she is surrounded by characters also purely invented by me, driven into life by the narrative. So there is the point where the story becomes its own self quite apart from the research which inspired it.

The Story

From the beginning: In the village 

‘ … Inside the house, Jenefer had Michael’s money neatly stacked. ‘Thank you Michael. Hubert  could not have done without you. He feels comfortable with you.’

Michael shrugged. ‘He’s a queer old coot, but he’s no harm.’

Jenefer smiled at him. ‘Finn was telling me you have twin sisters. i’d love to see them. My father was a twin. Strange phenomenon, twins.’

He looked around the warm cluttered kirched which smelled of herbs and smokey geraniums. ‘They want nothing here, Mrs Loumis. You’ll forgive me.’

She smiled straight into his eyes. ‘Well, Michael, if those twins fall sick or they need anything, you bring them to me.’

He put his cap back on his head. ‘Well, thank you for the pay. If you want anything else done, you know where to find us.’ He turned on his heel and left.

Jenefer turned her smile on Finn. ‘I think I’ve made progress with that young man Finn.’

Finn leaned against the dresser. ‘You turn your charm on the lot of us Jenefer We’re all sows ears turning into silk purses aren’t we?’

From near the end: In France

(After swimming with Finn, Kate, the ‘model’ has met Denis Constandine  -a leading British Fascist - in her swish hotel bedroom…’

…He wrinkled his nose I thought you’d want to get rid of the nasty salt water and that awful smell of Fleury’s chocolate’ He looked at the bed. ‘And a little rest before your evening’s activities.’

She took her silk wrap from the wardrobe. ‘I’m not waiting around here for you. I’m going dancing tonight. At the Blue Cat.’

‘Ah with your little friend Finn? Not indulging in private enterprise I hope. You know our little arrangement. An exclusive contract.’ He watched her as she peeled off her clothes, rubbed her fingers together and licked them, tasting the sea on her lips. She looked at him directly. ‘There’s nothing in our agreement that says I can’t enjoy my holiday.’

(Later… Kate and Finn are in the Blue Cat, where the floor is made of glass.)

 ‘You might not be able to swim, Finn,  but you certainly can dance,‘ said Kate as Finn was handed back off the dancefloer to the table by an engineer from Coventry. ‘Where did you learn to dance like that? Are there lots of dancehalls in tht queer little place you come from?’

Finn shook her head, ‘I have a friend. We dance to her pramophine, with her husband. It’s much easier here with that orchestra. At least you don’t have to wind them up all the time.’ She laughed, And the floor! They won’t believe me when I tell them about the floor!’

The dance florr was not large but was made entirely of glass, Dancing was like gliding on ice.

Research point: There was such a place and the floor was made of glass… 

Marathon Author’s Note: I had forgotten that in the background I have Jonty Clelland, pacifist and activist from Riches of The Earth and Land of Your  Possession, alongside his gifted wife Susanah.

I hope you enjoy it!

Scroll down for similar marathon  posts about

Riches of the Earth 

Under a Brighter Sky

& Land of Your Possession